By Sakshi Jain and Pallavi Shastry

The Rails Girls Summer of Code found me as a Ruby enthusiast. A little syntactical knowledge of Ruby took me to the glamour of Rails Girls SoC. Me and my partner, Pallavi Shastry, from Bengaluru, chose to work for diaspora, a privacy-aware decentralized, social network. Before contributing to diaspora, we tried our hands at Rails Girls Rails App Generator. The generator adds comments targeted at Rails Girls students to migrations, routes, controllers, models and views. It omits more advanced things like the respond_to blocks and jason stuff in controllers etc. This project also includes a Jekyll-based website on Github Pages which explains things briefly and gives pointers to guides or other resources. After completing the Rails Girls App Generator project, we dived into diaspora* which did sound more like learning to swim in a big ocean instead of a pool! The diaspora* issues that were assigned to us by our mentor were: 1. Blocking people from the profile page 2. Adopt a pull request 3. Full content in email notification for public posts 4. No content in email notification for limited posts We got 2 pull requests merged into diaspora*. Learnt about the testing workflow, rails internationalization, ActionMailers and a lot more. The open source journey with Rails Girls Summer of Code helped me build my confidence and made me realize that I too have an amazing chance to change the world and make things better and happen! The talk will surely benefit the students who wish to apply for RGSOC next time. The attendees of the conference might get inspired to become coaches for the future Rails Girls. The attendees could also help girls to understand Ruby on Rails technology and help them contribute to open source. Hopefully, there will be more RGSOC participants from India, in future.